I am not sure what made me so concerned about the shopping bill. NZ$125 equated to around about £50 if I recall the exchange rate correctly. Fifty pounds to feed a family of six for a week, maybe even a little more, doesn’t seem extreme to me.

I am not sure if I was still receiving pocket money in those days. I assume that I was. I did not have a Saturday job and although my financial needs were small I remember that I sometimes had money to spend at the school tuck shop even if I had a packed lunch with me. That money must have come from somewhere and only very occasionally did Mum and Dad give us money to buy our lunch, so they would not have sent me with both a packed lunch and lunch money.

Either way, NZ$125 probably did seem like a lot of money to me, but then I wasn’t always with Mum when she went food shopping so I probably had no idea of the real cost of all of the things that we as a family consumed each week.